Successfully batting a baseball pitched by a talented pitcher is regarded by many as among the most difficult feats of hand to eye coordination in sports. In fact, a success rate of 30% (a 0.300 batting average) is regarded as exemplary and a 25% success rate is typically regarded as the norm. These seemingly low success rates are attributable to, among other things, the speed with which a fast ball gets to home plate, the non-linear path taken by a curve ball and other pitches, and the individual pitcher's ability to conceal both the type of pitch thrown and the ball release. Furthermore, pitchers typically vary the type of pitch thrown and the location (high or low, inside or outside) of the pitch in an attempt to make the pitches more difficult to hit.
Various methods and machines have been used in efforts to improve the batting averages. For instance, it has been common to use a coach or other player to pitch balls to batters for practice. As an alternative to using players and coaches to pitch balls for practice, pitching machines have been developed and employed. One type of pitching machine that has been used has a rotating pitching arm which slings a baseball toward home plate.
Another known type of known pitching machine has a pair of counter-rotating, resilient wheels into which a baseball is introduced. The resilient, rapidly spinning wheels grip the baseball and propel it at a high rate of speed. Typically, the balls are fed manually, one at a time, to the wheels or are fed by a hopper which delivers one ball at a time at regular spaced intervals.
While pitching machines of the types just described provide certain advantages over the use of baseball players and coaches, they provide only limited help in training for batting balls thrown by actual pitchers. It has heretofore been thought that such machines are inherently too mechanical and rote to provide good simulation of actual playing conditions beyond that of propelling balls along established trajectories. Also, these known machines do not afford the batter an opportunity to study the pitcher's motion.
Accordingly, it is seen that a need remains for an apparatus which more closely simulates the conditions faced by batters when batting against live pitchers and which is useful for studying the pitching motion of the pitcher. It is to the provision of such an apparatus, therefore, that the present invention is primarily directed.